A tyre recycler was charged with four waste management breaches on Friday (20 June) and faces 240 hours of community service on each charge.

Londonderry Crown Court heard how James Joseph Heaney of Spruce Meadows deposited over 400,000 tyres at two different sites, both of which were subject to arson attacks.

During July and November 2008, officers from the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, (NIEA) investigated the two sites operated by Heaney – the first was Pennyburn Industrial Estate and the second was Campsie Real Estate, both in Londonderry. The ‘substantial’ amount of tyres had been processed through a tyre ‘crumbing’ machine, where the waste tyres were ground down and the casing wire separated.

The two sites were abandoned in 2009 with around 20,000 tyres deposited at the Pennyburn site and approximately 385,500 tyres left at the Campsie site.

The Pennyburn site was set on fire on 18 August 2009, and the Campsie site on 4 October 2009, and the resulting fires deemed ‘major incidents’.

An Eglinton primary school was forced to close during the Campsie fire, which took four days to bring under control and involved around 70 fire fighters and eight pumps.

Contaminated water run-off from the fire entered the storm water drainage system and a stream which bounds the eastern perimeter of the site. NIEA’s Water Management Unit and the Northern Ireland Fire & Rescue Service placed pollution control measures into the storm water system and the stream to reduce potential impact on the stream and Lough Foyle, where the stream discharges.

Mr Heaney pleaded guilty to charges under the Waste and Contaminated Land (Northern Ireland) Order 1997 relating to ‘the keeping of controlled waste without there being in force a waste management licence’ and ‘the keeping of controlled waste in a manner likely to cause pollution to the environment or harm to human health’.

Heaney was sentenced to 240 hours community service for each of the four charges brought against him, to run concurrently.

Calls to change the way we recycle tyres

In England, the Environment Agency states that waste sites wishing to treat small amounts of end-of-life tyres (around 50 tonnes of tyres over a seven-day period) – by means of baling, shredding, peeling, shaving or granulating (to ‘ensure they can be recovered’) – can currently register for an environmental permit exemption. The exemptions are meant to increase the recovery of waste tyres as they reduce the administrative burden on waste sites.

However, the Tyre Recovery Association (TRA) has warned that the increasing numbers of waste sites registering for exemption are a ‘looming threat to the environment’, as they are often not policed.

The EA shut down a ‘record’ total of 1,279 sites between April 2012 and March 2013 alone, many of these contained the improper disposal of tyres, including recent cases in Southampton and Portsmouth.

Read more about waste management licensing in Northern Ireland.